I'm nosy by nature. It's why I look for meaning in details like the bump on a person's nose or the narrative inside a photograph. When I make these observations, I feel that I know something no one else does.

Friday, March 24, 2017

Mouth, Face and Mind: Maureen Dowd's words are boss in new Trump op-ed

Mouth, Face and Mind

In
Maureen Dowd’s latest New York Times op-ed,
she uses adjectives and nouns that evoke Donald Trump’s big mouth. It’s oral.
She constantly uses the words consume, howling, spewing and devour. That’s the
word devour as in “hungrily devour his own presidency.” She also mentioned a
snake that “eats its own tail” and “octopuses” that “consume their own arms.”

Trump eating.

That’s
quite violent, right? Dowd goes on to create imagery of mirrors and glass all
in reference to Trump’s reflective psyche. The phrases “infinity mirror room of
Trump’s mind” and “mirror rooms” obviously use the word “mirror,” but it’s a
clever, subtle way to refer to vanity. Can’t you picture Trump looking at his
himself in a hand mirror? He would hold it with a small hand adorned with
Adele-worthy talons, just like the Evil Queen from “Snow White.”

Dowd’s
intensely expressive language takes a violent turn when she continues the
mirror/glass theme by creating this sentence: “so many shards of gossip swirl
in his head.” The sentence conjures an image of broken glass from a mirror
plastered with cracked images of famous faces. The broken glass then slashes Trump’s brain like a
kitchen knife to a slab of ground beef. At the end of the op-ed, Dowd describes
Trump’s world as a “cracked-mirror world.”

The
masterful alliteration in the op-ed is no surprise, since Maureen Dowd is the alliteration
queen. She even gives Trump’s style of shaking hands a name called “surprise
shoulder squeeze.”

One
of my favorite moments in the article is when Dowd describes Trump's tweets as “transcendentally
nutty.” It made me think of Shirley MacLaine singing “I’m Here” in the film Postcards from the Edge.